A Reminiscence of Media – How Far We Have Come

Since man found out it was possible to record something onto film, it has been a long journey to get where we are today.  From Super 8mm to HDV we have come quite a long way in the last 50 years or so.  We’re going to reminisce about the days of old and how we made our movies back in the day..

Back in the sixties, 8mm home film camera became all the rage with you able to record your own home movies all by yourself… without a film crew!  Quite the crazy concept and one of the most high tech devices at the time, 8mm cameras were pretty freaking awesome.  Also, there are other forms of 8mm film, such as Super 8, Single 8, and Straight 8.  Super 8 became the next hot product seeing as it was easier to replace the film cartridges and also produces better pictures than the Standard 8 format.  Production of this was discontinued in the 90’s but you can still find it at some select stores.

Similar to the war between BluRay and HD-DVD… VHS, like BluRay came out on top in the consumer area of home video.  VHS became the standard video tape format around 1976, leaving those sorry Betamax video player consumers wishing they had saved their money… (like my dad who owns an HD-DVD Player).  VHS has run for quite a long time, with billions of movies printed on them, it had a 480×720 resolution, and was pretty good to watch your movies on.  Even better, were the home VHS recorders that weighed around 20 pounds and were much easier than 8mm film to shoot your home movies to.  After you were done, all you had to do was pop that tape in the VCR, and enjoy a lifetime of memories!  You could get 200m minutes of video in SP mode, and 600 minutes in EP mode.

The first real “handycam” video format was Hi-8 tape, which was introduced in 1989 by Sony, and it made for a bit more portable of a video format.  These offered a nice alternative to the monstrosities that were VHS recorders, and you were able to get adapters to play these in VCR’s or you just hook up your AV cords to the TV.  These only had an SP mode which let you get 2 hours of recording in.

All of these are compact versions of VHS used in the handycam era that was to come about in the late 80’s/early 90’s.  VHS-C or “Compact VHS”  was just that, a smaller version of VHS that you needed an adapter tape to play in a VHS player.  This shot just like VHS and was able to give you 40 minutes SP, or 120 minutes LP.  Now, S-VHS is “Super VHS”, which separated the color and brightness signals, giving you a better picture.  Back thing was, is these weren’t backward compatible with regular VHS players, so you needed a proprietary S-VHS recorder/player to get the full advantage of it.  And yeah, you guessed it, SVHS-C is the compact version of this Super VHS format.  Full size can get 160 minutes and the compact can only get 40 minutes.

Thank god this came along.  MiniDV revolutionized how easy it was to create home movies, play and edit them at home… truly making the home MOVIES.  MiniDV was introduced in 1996 and had a nearly loss-less broadcast quality picture.  This gave you a 480×720 picture, and best of all it was digital.  This meant that you could import your video via firewire into your computer without the use of an analog capture card, and start editing, and then output the video back to tape for playback on home TVs.  I remember when I got my first miniDV camcorder, it was a glorious day.

Since the dawn of miniDV there have been many other file formats arise such as HDV, P2, AVCHD, DVD-R and so on, but those are for another article.  There are always new and excited formats being developed all the time, and you never know what might be premiered next.  I mean do you ever think that those hippies shooting on 8mm would ever have imagined something like the RED Epic 617?  I don’t think so.  If you want to learn more about the history of video formats and the formats that I might have left out, since they were minor and not worth noting, check out UltimateWebDesigning.com’s format chart, which has a boatload of information and really opens your eyes to how far we have come.